The goal of this task is to separate out infoboxes and navboxes from article content, and to provide fluent editors for them. This would allow mobile (for example) to more easily tweak the presentation of infoboxes, without having to parse the article content, recognize them, and pull them out. A desirable side-effect is to make it more routine to source data and label texts for infoboxes/navboxes from wikidata, so that they can be shared among wikis in different languages. An extensible design would allow a local wiki to inherit most of an infobox, but still override, delete, or add fields, to empower local editors and account for political sensitivities.

A key component could be T107595: [RFC] Multi-Content Revisions, which has proposed a new content model for articles in core which would allow storage of infoboxes/navboxes separate from the article content.

SUMMIT PLAN

Leave with a unified plan for the future of infoboxes and navboxes, including buy-in from wikidata, the mediawiki-core team (for storage separate from article content), mobile (to replace their current display hacks), editing (to create the necessary tools), and analytics (to ensure that infoboxes remain easy to edit, but not significantly easier to vandalize).

Great topic for discussion, @cscott! Do you think this is an exhaustive list of alternatives, or is this "the list"?

The fastest way to make a change will be if we have a finite list of viable alternatives, and then use the meeting as an opportunity to hash out our collective favorite. However, that's not realistic without a lot of upfront work to get everyone to agree on the composition of the list. Do you have an intermediate goal for narrowing down our options to a finite list to choose from?

These are all the alternatives I know of, and I talked to a lot of people about this at Wikimania. But there may be more, there are three-ish months from now until the summit for folks to add anything I missed.

I suspect the collective decision will be to proceed with a hybrid of the "best of" these various alternatives. For example, Capiunto is functional, but I think it wants tweaks to wikidata, and we'd like it not to be embedded in the article content. And perhaps we can learn from wikia's implementation something about the wikidata content model required. So the goal would be not just to identify an already-existing winner, but to describe the remaining work to be done and then to marshall the resources needed to get the work done.

I'm of the opinion that this isn't an engineering problem, it's a community buy-in problem.

As you can see from the task description, we've got multiple implementations for Wikidata-backed infoboxes in the wild. There are working infoboxes on production wikis which are completely Wikidata-backed (e.g. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Infobox_Fromage). But yet, they've not seen widespread adoption. Why is this? Why are people not using them? What do people think is missing? What do we need to do next to support wider rollout?

I'd like to see any session around be entirely focussed instead on answering the above questions. The engineering solution can come later.

I'm of the opinion that this isn't an engineering problem, it's a community buy-in problem.

As you can see from the task description, we've got multiple implementations for Wikidata-backed infoboxes in the wild. There are working infoboxes on production wikis which are completely Wikidata-backed (e.g. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Infobox_Fromage). But yet, they've not seen widespread adoption. Why is this? Why are people not using them? What do people think is missing? What do we need to do next to support wider rollout?

I'd like to see any session around be entirely focussed instead on answering the above questions. The engineering solution can come later.

+1000 This!
Anything in this direction has the potential to cause a huge backlash. If this is done wrong this can cause Wikidata adoption on the Wikipedias to be set back to 0 for a long time. This needs to be first carefully considered from the product-perspective and I need to be involved in this.
Dan: We need to have a discussion about this when you're in Berlin.

I believe the distinction between "engineering solutions" and "community
use" is a false one. The point of this summit topic would be to learn from
everyone---community, existing implementation experience, analytics, etc
etc---so that we can (a) come up with engineering solutions to problems
with existing implementations, and (b) ensure that we build the Right
Thing, the thing that the community wants and needs. We shouldn't exclude
technical talk, any more than we should exclude community input. We need
to consider both together.

I'll defer to @RobLa on this, since every significant topic proposed for the summit ought to incorporate community input. I believe the plan is to actively reach out to representatives from affected communities, although "template authors" was the specific example discussed.

I am in agreement with @Deskana here and @Lydia_Pintscher ''s comment about potential backlash. If nothing, the proposal title should be retitled -- the "kill infoboxes and navboxes" phrase should go -- because that is not the intention.

Well, I hope we don't need to scrub the fun out of our session titles. Removing infoboxes from content while they "long live" (as separate items associated with the article, not commingled with the content) is indeed exactly what is proposed.

What people want; and by "people" I mean "experienced and inexperienced Wikipedians who edit in English and other languages":

Not to go to Wikidata to edit data. Even if Wikidata has nicely-designed forms and internationalization. Practically nobody I talk to about this wants to leave the home wiki. The nicely-designed form must appear in the home wiki, in one way or another, and of course it must be localizable and seamlessly integrated. Yes, it's a big thing, but everybody says it.

Not to lose control over the local design of the infoboxes.

Not to lose the ability to override the data locally. As just one example, at least some wikipedians who write in Hebrew won't appreciate if Wikidata doesn't show Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in the country infobox at least in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and there are plenty of other examples. (Yes, in ideal world infoboxes in all languages will show all POVs neutrally, and it will be backed by common linked data. I'm OK with getting to an ideal world in stages.)

As an important positive point, people definitely do want to invest as little time as possible in translating infoboxes when they translate articles. I am certainly biased on this point as the ContentTranslation PM, but in all honesty, this is one of ContentTranslation's most-requested features, and rightly so. For better or worse, it's not quite right for ContentTranslation to do it, where as something like Wikidata, done correctly, sounds far more suitable.

cscott renamed this task from A plan to kill infoboxes and navboxes from article content (long live infoboxes and navboxes)! to Separating infoboxes and navboxes from article content.Sep 21 2015, 10:01 PM

This task seems to be a mix of separating *boxes from article source (ie. they should not be stored in the main wikitext content but in a separate content chunk or entirely autogenerated or whatever) and separating them from rendered output (ie. they should not output raw HTML but some kind of structured data, which might then be turned into HTML but is also available directly to apps or alternative skins).

I think that's confusing as they are largely independent (separating in source would help with separation in output but is not a necessity) and have different hardships. Separating in source would be a huge workflow change so that's more of an UX problem than an engineering problem (or rather, it should only become an engineering problem once the UX problem is solved). Also the case for it is weaker, IMO - most of the benefits are associated with the output-level separation, which should be an uncontroversial architectural change that would only affect template maintainers.

Congratulations! This is one of the 52 proposals that made it through the first deadline of the Wikimedia-Developer-Summit-2016selection process. Please pay attention to the next one: > By 6 Nov 2015, all Summit proposals must have active discussions and a Summit plan documented in the description. Proposals not reaching this critical mass can continue at their own path out of the Summit.

This is definitely an engineering problem, but one that needs research into how different projects handle their infoboxes, navboxes, and even related variants. The question is how it can be made to work across projects with different needs (and what those needs are), with or without wikidata, still easily editable...

Even within a single project I can see a lot of different ways these would be used just depending on the part of the project, but could it be standardised? How far could skins go with these? Would it behave like a ToC or thumb placed within the content, really much as before?

Hey, @RobLa-WMF -- I noticed this is scheduled for an 80 minute slot starting 11:30AM on the first day of the summit -- opposite an open slot in the larger Robertson 1. What's the expected format of this session? Should I start by presenting an overview of the various options to set the stage?

@cscott, thanks for pinging me, and yes, your proposal to introduce and then open it up sounds perfect, thanks! Think "lightning talk" for your intro. 5 minutes is ideal, 10 minutes for something more complicated, everyone has a right to be annoyed if you take 15 minutes, and we cut off your microphone at 20 minutes. :-) That make sense?

@hoo Are you attending the summit? Can you talk a little bit about T114251?

I planned to talk about it, but due to various communication problems that never went anywhere, so I pulled it out of the summit at some point. Nevertheless, I will still attend the summit.

I guess the RfC is going to go through the normal process then or maybe at the Hackathon or during Wikimania or something like that. Although I don't really know how much I will be able to work on that next year (from WMDE), I still hope to be able to work on that within 2016.

So one of my goals here is cross-fertilization. We've got a bunch of folks who have worked on various flavors of "better infobox". I'd like to make sure we get a chance to talk shop and say what we liked/didn't liked about our various approaches, and see if we can't come up with a better mousetrap (or agree that someone's particular mousetrap is already the best).

@RobLa-WMF suggests that this is important from the perspective of the "Next Generation Content Loading and Routing" track as well, since we're proposing to decouple infoboxes from article content in various ways.

Session name: Separating infoboxes and navboxes from article content
Meeting goal: "unified plan for the future of infoboxes and navboxes (overly optimistic)"
Meeting style: Scope Narrowing
Phabricator task link: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112987
Topics for discussion:
* Should infoboxes be stored inline, or separately from the wikitext? (See also Multi-Content revisions RFC)
* Daniel: migrating already existing infoboxes problematic
* Implementation other's than hoo's
General notes
Everybody knows navboxes and infoboxes. Used and abused.
There are several technical solutions, e.g. Wikia and WMF's Mobile apps. Hoo has another plan.
Wikia: New markup, xml-based.
Mobile: They turned it off because it was too easy to edit them.
Gabriel: "content widgets", syntax for direc queries from Wikidata
C. Scott's suggestion:
Marius (hoo) - "Magic infoboxes" implemention:
capiunto - small extension for Scribunto that helps make creating / formatting infoboxes easier (as they exist now)
decouple infoboxes from page content:
* separate schema definition
* separate data defintion (can be local and/or from wikidata)
* lua modules for formatting (e.g. capiunto)
CScott: this (consistent formatting) makes scraping easier
Daniel: parameters still would be wikitext
Trevor: note templates containing subtemplates or runs of multiple templates which open/continue/close a single transclusion
JamesF: E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_ship_begin#Special_capabilities (contains 4 subtemplates including the flags)
marktraceur (EPL comment): I think ^ would present more problems than just the subtemplates, based on it being a "begin" template, and therefore probably an unbalanced DOM fragment
quiddity (EPL comment): or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_currency which uses {{native name}}, {{flag}}, and {{url}}.
DJ: how to handle converting units (e.g.)?
Daniel: there would be formatter for dates, units, etc. and lua can be used to help deal with specific types of information (e.g. timezones)
CScott: have toolbox in lua for most stuff
Trevor: Why even use DOM?
CScott: Because I haven't finished [..?..] yet.
Jiang (etherpad): many infobox are not as simple as key-value, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Lewis
TheDJ: infoboxes don't just contain simple key-value pairs. E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterrey_Institute_of_Technology_and_Higher_Education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKail,_Western_Australia (a list of suburbs around a town)
Tim: Module:Infobox is used on 2.5 million pages in en.wikipedia
CScott - topics to discuss:
* any implementation other than hoo's?
* migration issue
not all data / properties are represneted on wikidata, but there still is option of having local data for such cases
Use the ~100 colors in WikiData? http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?q=1075&rp=279&method=list
CScott: One goal is to make data easier to read for machines, but another important goal is to make the data more accessible to humans, in particular in "small" wikis.
TheDJ: Could we do it similarly to Commons metadata migration?
Potential action items
* "Dumb" migration, like commons metadata
* Migration toolkit
* Survey/classification of existing templates (survey quality and distribution)
2.5 million + infoboxes, but how many *types* of infoboxes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_infoboxes

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@cscott: Is there general consensus on those action items? (T112987#1661396 implied that scope is unclear. T112987#1795019 stated this needs more research.) Who could break them down into subtasks? (I don't see any "blocked by"/subtasks in this task.)